Pide and Potholders

We had some special guests over last night who are ending their time in the U.S. so we prepared a feast. One guest is from Israel and the other guest is from Greece. We knew that if we tried to cook something from my Israeli cookbook, or If I tried to prepare one of my Greek favorites like Galaktoboureko that the guests would smile and say that it was great, but really it could never compare to Mom or Granny's cooking in their home countries, so I decided to tackle a dish from a neighbor to the two countries, Turkey. Greece shares a small border with Turkey and although Israel does not share a border with Turkey, it is close enough, and Turkish food can certainly be found in Israel. This, I hoped, would be a smarter approach, something familiar yet exotic to our guests, like Mexican food in the U.S. and would spark some interesting conversation. I was inspired by the bakers at Our Patisserie to attempt to bake some pides, Turkish stuffed bread, similar to a calzone, stromboli or pizza. Being such a big pizza city, surprisingly Chicago doesn't really have a lot of calzones and strombolis like the East Coast, but we do have a few spots where you can find pides, usually filled with lamb or feta and spinach. The dough is soft and a little sweet. I'm sure there are pides being baked in the Bay Area somewhere but I haven't found them yet. There is a place where Grove meets Market St in San Francisco that serves something similar. We couldn't resist topping our pides with sesame seeds, and we found another excuse to use up our fava greens in the filling which we mixed with spinach, parsley, egg, and feta cheese. Unbaked pide Baked pideOf course we had to bust out some vegi and meat pizzas too. Plenty of fennel in the sausage.MP3: POtholders